China Will Be the World's Largest Digital Market by 2018

China will soon overtake the United States in the digital economy. According to calculations by analysts at Statista, Greater China’s digital market will outstrip the US market as early as 2018. As a result, China will be the largest digital economy before becoming the world’s largest economy.

These projections are based on data from Statista’s Digital Economy Compass, a new comprehensive compendium on the global digital market. It examines the competitive development of the platform business in eCommerce, eTravel and Digital Media. Already, the four major Chinese players Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei have achieved impressive figures and are increasingly operating on a global level. “In the foreseeable future, the growth of the US big four will be increasingly challenged by their Chinese counterparts,” says Tobias Bohnhoff, Head of Market Analytics with Statista. “Furthermore there is no major player from the West that has comparable reach or impact on the global digital landscape.”

The Statista Digital Economy Compass highlights the figures and factors behind these developments and provides a comprehensive overview of the platform business in the key markets of the United States, China and Europe. It analyzes the trends and gives deep insights into the hard facts of different sub-segments, from media and marketing to connected cars, smart homes, and fintech. Special attention is given to the influence of the driving forces cloud, social, mobile and voice-control. In addition, specific chapters cover the topics of venture capital, “Who will beat who in the platform business?”, and cutting-edge technologies like AI, AR, and VR. “With the Digital Economy Compass, we have created a standard work for the digital business,” says Felix Wegener, analyst for digital markets at Statista. “It is a reference work full of fundamental and useful statistics, which every decision-maker in the digital business should definitely bookmark.”

Check out the full Digital Economy Compass here.